WHILE many of us have sang along to The Cranberries’ biggest hit song Zombie, few of us are familiar with the tragedy that inspired Dolores O’Riordan to write it.

O’Riordan died yesterday morning in a London hotel room, on a day the 46 year old was due to record her vocals for a new version of her iconic hit Zombie.

Written during the band’s UK tour in 1993 and released the following year, Zombie is in memory of two children killed in an IRA bombing in Warrington, Cheshire.

Two bombs detonated within a minute of each other in litter bins on Bridge Street on March 20, killing three year old Johnathan Ball and injuring 12 year old Tim Parry who died five days later.

The IRA claimed responsibility for the attack, but insisted they had given two warnings prior to detonation and police had failed to act in time.

Moved by the violence, the Limerick singer penned the five minute song in a seething condemnation of the IRA and a visceral response to the death of two young children.

“I remember seeing one of the mothers on television, just devastated,” she told Vox magazine in 1994.

“I felt so sad for her, that she’d carried him for nine months, been through all the morning sickness, the whole thing and some prick, some airhead who thought he was making a point, did that.”

O’Riordan was particularly offended that terrorists claimed to have carried out these acts in the name of Ireland.

“The IRA are not me. I’m not the IRA,” she said. “The Cranberries are not the IRA. My family are not.

“When it says in the song, ‘It’s not me, it’s not my family,’ that’s what I’m saying. It’s not Ireland, it’s some idiots living in the past.”

“I don’t care whether it’s Protestant or Catholic, I care about the fact that innocent people are being harmed,” she told Vox. “That’s what provoked me to write the song.

“It was nothing to do with writing a song about it because I’m Irish. You know, I never thought I’d write something like this in a million years. I used to think I’d get into trouble.”

She later told NME in 1994: “[Zombie] doesn’t take sides. It’s a very human song.

“To me, the whole thing [terrorism] is very confused. If these adults have a problem with these other adults well then, go and fight them. Have a bit of balls about it at least, you know?”

This morning, Tim Parry’s father Colin Parry told Good Morning Ulster that he had been touched by the lyrics did not realise they were written about his son until after O’Riordan’s death.

“Only yesterday did I discover that her group, or she herself, had composed the song in memory of the event in Warrington,” he said.

“I was completely unaware what it was about.

“I got the song up on my laptop, watched the band singing, saw Dolores and listened to the words.

“The words are both majestic and also very real.

“The event at Warrington, like the many events that happened all over Ireland and Great Britain, affected families in a very real way and many people have become immune to the pain and suffering that so many people experienced during that armed campaign.

“To read the words written by an Irish band in such compelling way was very, very powerful.

“I likened it to the enormous amount of mail expressing huge sympathy that we received in the days, weeks and months following our loss.

“Proportionately a very high total of that came from the island of Ireland,” he said.

Former West Brom and Coventry forward Cyrille Regis has died, aged 59.

Regis won five caps for England between 1982 and 1987, having been one of the stars of the Baggies team between 1977 and 1984.

He scored 112 goals in 297 appearances for Albion before moving on to Coventry, winning the FA Cup with the Sky Blues in 1987.

The Professional Footballers’ Association announced the news on Monday morning and wrote in a tweet from its official account: “A true gentleman and legend, he will be deeply missed. Our sympathies to his family and friends.”

Regis was born in French Guiana in February 1958 but moved to London with his family at the age of five.

He did not come through the youth ranks with a professional club and was instead spotted playing Sunday morning football by the chairman of Surrey non-league club Molesey.

View photos

Laurie Cunningham, Brendan Batson and Cyrille Regis were nicknamed The Three Degrees – and here they are with the American pop trio

But it was in the top tier of English football that his goalscoring feats were most lauded, netting 158 league goals.

In 1984 he moved to Coventry City where he continued where he left off with the Baggies, with 62 goals – and his only major trophy in football came in 1987 when he won the FA Cup with the Sky Blues.

Regis also played for Aston Villa and Wolves before spells at Wycombe and Chester where he ended his career.

Regis represented England at under-21 level and won his first senior cap in February 1982 against Northern Ireland.

His final cap came against Turkey in October 1987.

After his stint at Coventry he also played for Aston Villa, Wolves, Wycombe and Chester before ending his playing career in 1996.

He worked as an agent for the Stellar Group after his retirement from the game, and the agency’s chief executive Jonathan Barnett released a statement to Press Association Sport on Monday.

Wonderful

“Cyrille was a wonderful person to work with and his death has left everyone in the company and the players he represented with a great sense of sadness,” Barnett said.

“Cyrille was a pioneer in British football and hugely respected by everyone in the game. He was a role model to his young clients and a genuinely lovely man.”

The statement from Stellar also praised Regis for his “passion, determination and integrity, especially in the way he would champion the careers of up and coming players”.

Praising the role played by Regis in dealing with racism, he said: “In later years I was privileged to get to know him as a friend and he just didn’t carry anger with him from that time. Apart from being a powerful and talented striker, Regis inspired a generation of black players at a time when they were a rarity in the top echelons of English soccer and were regularly subjected to racial abuse from crowds.

On one occasion he received a bullet in the mail along with a threat that he would get one in the knee if he played for England at Wembley.

“The racism was quite abhorrent but I turned a negative into a positive,” he recalled. “I chased harder and played harder, I wanted to score goals and win points.”

Regis returned to West Brom as a coach before becoming a football agent.

The old cliche about rugby being a game for hooligans played by gentlemen is still casually recycled on a regular basis.

Today’s footballers, frankly, should sue next time anyone with an oval-ball background seeks to use a superior tone. The weekend delivered more fresh ammunition: Toulon’s Mathieu Bastareaud has issued an apology for the homophobic abuse he appeared to direct at the Benetton lock Sebastian Negri but the reputational damage has been done, both to him and his sport. So much for noblesse oblige and sportsmanlike conduct.

Rugby’s noble image has, in truth, always been a subjective issue. Few who played in the south-west of France or in south Wales on a wet Wednesday night in the amateur era ever came across much in the way of soft play or kindly advice. “Do that again and you’ll live up to your name,” was the threat famously directed at Dai Young, the great Lions and Wales prop, only partly in jest. Part of rugby’s appeal used to be its twilight world, to borrow from AC/DC’s back catalogue, of dirty deeds done dirt cheap.

Plenty of people, in short, behaved badly but few beyond the participants ever heard about it, save for a few ribald after-dinner speeches a quarter of a century later. Now, with microphones and TV cameras practically inserted up the players’ nostrils there is no hiding place. A big Frenchman abuses a Zimbabwean-born Italian in the last minute of a relatively low-profile pool game and thousands have already passed judgment on social media before the pair reach the dressing rooms.

Bastareaud now finds himself staring down the barrel of a lengthy ban and rightly so. The only small consolation to which he can cling is that rugby’s sanctions are consistent only in their unpredictability. Last week Joe Marler received a six-week suspension for a shoulder to the head of TJ Ioane; some argued he should not even have received a red card. This week it is James Haskell’s turn in the dock following his sending-off for clattering high into Harlequins’ Jamie Roberts. Those insisting he was unlucky must have forgotten all the World Rugby directives last year specifically instructing referees to show zero tolerance towards players who, deliberately or not, catch opponents on the head.

Roll up, roll up: welcome to modern rugby’s moral maze. Bastareaud aside, the definition of serious naughtiness has never been more confusing. Catch a leaping player a split-second early in the air and you could receive anything from a penalty to a lengthy ban; clear out a ruck even a fraction too high and the same uneasy game of disciplinary roulette applies. You need the judgement of a Nasa scientist to be absolutely spot-on every time; either way an opponent will probably try to convince the referee otherwise.

The Bastareaud case, whether he was provoked or not, clearly belongs in a different category but imagine you are a member of rugby’s judiciary. Is abusing someone verbally a worse sin than attempting to gouge their eyes out? Is swearing at the referee a significantly more serious crime against the game’s core values than, say, faking injury or attempting to get an opponent sent off? Maybe the answer is a new catch-all offence, beyond mere unsportsmanlike conduct, carrying an entry-level punishment of six weeks for anyone guilty of tarnishing rugby’s good name, whether by word or deed.

The worsening picture is not all about money’s corrupting influence, either. Only last November the Scottish Rugby Union dished out a record 347 weeks of suspensions to 14 players, a coach and an official from Howe of Fife RFC following a grim initiation ceremony on a team bus which reportedly left one player with internal injuries. In September an 18-year-old Australian received a 10-year ban after striking the referee in the face during a local under-19s final.

No sport can ever be immune to bad publicity but rugby, given its physical nature, treads a more precarious line than most. The game’s traditional code of respect between players, coaches and officials – “Scrum please, sir” – has certainly never felt more frayed. To castigate everyone for the bigoted language of one individual might feel unfair but, when they look themselves in the mirror, rugby’s guardians should be honest enough to admit there is a growing problem. Never mind the moral high ground; rugby is on an increasingly slippery behavioural slope.

Meghan Markle, 36, and Prince Harry, 33, are set to get married on May 19 — and although it’s no secret the gorgeous former actress has broken a number of unwritten royal traditions over the course of their year-and-a-half whirlwind courtship (including this royal fashion faux-pas during the engagement announcement) — there’s one royal rule she won’t be able to break: wearing the crown jewels before her wedding.

This is because, according to The Mirror, royal etiquette rules prevent unmarried women from wearing tiaras.

“Flashy diamonds and tiaras are not worn during the day, and only married ladies wear tiaras,” Grant Harold, the U.K.’s premiere etiquette expert, told the BBC. “For married ladies it was a sign of status and would show you were taken and not looking for a husband.”

So while Meghan has to wait until after marriage before accessing the crown jewels, a very married Kate Middleton is able to wear them right now.

Google Glass perhaps didn’t receive the earth-shattering response the company – and world – had expected. However, a proposal that Samsung appears to have in the works could be the augmented reality wearable tech everybody is holding out for.

Samsung has filed a patent in South Korea for a smart contact lens fitted with a camera and image display. In addition, it will feature sensors that can control certain functions simply by blinking. The concept design requires an accompanying smartphone to do some of the leg-work, which would be wirelessly connected to the lenses.

Major landmarks, businesses and households in cities around the world turned their lights off for one hour at 8.30pm on Saturday 19 March to raise awareness about climate change and show support for renewable energy